Further adventures in game development: I've been working with Clutter to create a primitive client-side game engine to integrate with gzochi. Clutter's a 2-D scene graph library for writing OpenGL applications in C. It's the canvas library behind Mutter and, from what I can tell, a bunch of next-level GTK+ stuff. The documentation says it's for building "visually rich graphical user interfaces," but I don't see why you couldn't also use it to, say, manage the layout of a game screen, which is what I'm trying to use it for: There are a lot of things I don't miss from my brief career as a professional Flash developer, but computing dirty rectagles and figuring out the draw order for actors in a scene isn't something I was looking forward to writing myself. Finding Clutter felt serendipitous.

One thing Clutter doesn't come with, though, is a component that can render frame-based animations, which I'm modeling as sets of raster images that get painted on the stage in sequence at a specified rate. I've built some components that can load image atlases from disk or over the web and carve them up into frames in memory, and I've been trying to get Clutter to turn those frames into a flipbook. It took a lot of meditating over the documentation and some coaching from Clutter developers on IRC for me to get that doing animations this way wasn't going to be a misuse of the library -- but it would be something I'd have to write myself.

Clutter does ship with some data structures you can use for displaying images, so that's what I tried first. There are two: ClutterTexture, which is a GObject subtype of ClutterActor; and ClutterImage, which implements the ClutterContent interface and can thus be used to render ClutterActors that don't know how to render themselves. I saw some indication online that ClutterTexture was probably on its way out, so the first technique I used to implement my animation system was to have a handler for the "new-frame" signal on an animation-specific ClutterTimeline update the internal state of the animated actor's ClutterImage content with the pixel data for a new frame (via clutter_image_set_data). To my surprise, it actually worked (go Clutter!) but it also drove the CPU utilization on my netbook up to about 60%. Here's why: Since Clutter gets its drawing done via OpenGL (actually via Cogl, a GL/GLES compatibility layer), before you can display an image to the framebuffer, Clutter wants to get a handle to a CoglTexture, a block of allocated (and filled-out) GPU texture memory. Pushing textures to the GPU is expensive, so doing it every frame is pretty much a non-starter.

The next thing I tried was maintaining a roster of ClutterImage objects, each with static, pre-uploaded data for a single frame of animation, and updating the content of my sprite actor with the requisite image (via clutter_actor_set_content) on every new frame. This was an improvement, but only got me down to about 40% utilization. I think the problem with this approach might have been that updating the content at the actor level triggers an invalidation that forces some unnecessary invalidations of the scene graph that are expensive to recalculate, but I didn't investigate deeply.

At the suggestion of someone on IRC, the next thing I tried was creating my own implementation of the ClutterContent interface such that the paint_content function would use a pre-uploaded Cogl texture to paint each required frame. The paint_content function has the prototype:

void (*) (ClutterContent *, ClutterActor *, ClutterPaintNode *);

...where ClutterPaintNode argument is a local root of the render graph that corresponds to the actor to which the content is attached (content can be shared across multiple actors). To get your content painted, you need to attach a child paint node to that root. The ClutterPaintNode interface doesn't expose any primitive drawing callbacks, so I don't think they want you to write your own, but there's a provided implementation (ClutterTexturePaintNode) that paints the contents of the texture you give it. I built my ClutterContent implementation around this paint node type -- and it worked, but I was still at around 30% CPU. When I profiled my application, I found that the invalidation signal was being fired much more frequently than the new-frame signal, and the default mechanism for handling invalidation -- which I wasn't sure I wanted to override -- queues a paint operation.

I was feeling a bit down in the mouth about the prospects of animating my sprite at 20% CPU or less. I started Googling various combinations of "clutter" and "animation," and somehow arrived at the Gitorious page for Rob Staudinger's clutter-sprite project, which promises obliquely to provide "A sprite actor for clutter." It didn't look like much, but I started rifling the source files to see if I could learn something. Sure enough, I found that Rob cleverly overrides ClutterActor's paint function and uses cogl_rectangle to paint the frame of animation directly from an image stored as a CoglMaterial, skirting the Clutter render tree entirely. Using a variation on his technique, I was able to get my utilization down to about 25%, which seems like it might be as low as I'm going to get with my netbook's GPU and this version of Clutter.